1. Tiburon said:

What utter drivel. "Electoral and Parliamentary tricks". This isn't a 'board game', Omri Ceren, nor, for a plurality of secular or 'traditional' Israelis, is it a question of 'religious obligation'. These aren't "tricks", Omri - they are blatently illegal and candidly TRAITOROUS UNDER STANDING ISRAELI and INTERNATIONAL LAW acts perpetrated by a soon-to-be ostensibly fascist oligarchy made up of a tiny minority (perhaps, max: - 20% of Israeli population) of radical secularist 'post-Zionists' who unfortunately hold near total sway in their hold on Israeli Media, the Judiciary, and the reins of power, effected through an obscenely corrupt administration of the public purse - itself a legacy of a dinosaur social-fascist administrative structure courtesy Mapai, Histadrut, et. al.

This, this confrontation, has an element, (IMHO THE central element, but that's me...) of "religious obligation", but to the Land and People of Israel, the Jews the 'battle' is over REGIME CHANGE: - Whether Israel will grow to be finally in harmony with it's raison d'etre - a JEWISH STATE; or whether it will by slow or quick degeneration, become a "state of all it's citizens", Jewish only in name and at best a mere 'spiritual disneyland', a by-word. Not long, if history is any teacher, will Jews remain sovereign in the latter such country. And this all apart from the clear and present danger of a unilateral retreat, under fire, in face of a fanatic international jihadist enemy, and the lessons THEY will take from such lack of Jewish National Will.

I don't doubt that you have some vague and naive conception of Israel as a 'noble democracy' (and that you also 'care' for Israel's Fortune), but also that 1)Such definition flies in face of totalitarian acts by authority, too many to recount, that would bring revolution in a more warlike populace; and 2)Your attempt to claim 'moral high ground' with appeals to "rule of law" are specious when that "law" protects the interests ONLY of a distinct minority who "RULE". "Rule of Law" is not so when it is a 'Law of the Rulers', Omri.

As Merry said to Pippin in LOTR: - "There won't BE a Shire, Pippin!"

And BTW: - Please Stop refering to the Knesset as a "Parliament". It cheapens the term.

2. Robert Kriegsman said:

The Weimar Republic in Germany of the 1920s and 1930s allowed Hitler and the
Nazi Party to take over through democratic means. Hitler's opponents lost
power "because of a parliamentary trick" (An inside deal made by Franz Von Papen,
President Hindenberg and others).

Should we now say that subsequent laws like the Nuremberg Laws are valid and:

people living in democracies bind themselves to the process itself? That the rule of law is not about getting "just" results, but it's a process-based dynamic in which results have legitimacy precisely because they came about through electoral and parliamentary tricks?
By your logic, we should.

Israel's Knesset system with its party lists controlled by party bosses
is structured like the Weimar Republic parliament. As in post-WW11
Nazi Germany, "I was just following orders" was deemed to be an illegimate
excuse, and the same should apply in other cases, like Israel.

Forced expulsions of ones citizens based on their religion may not be on the same scale of mass gasings and executions, but you would be hard-pressed to name one other "democracy"
that has attempted to do so.

3. Tamar said:

"Now we'll see whether Israel is a democracy governed by the rule of law,,,,,,"

Stop right there! Omri!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Have you ever read a single article posted on IsrPundit????

The "State of Israel" represented by Bulldozer Sharon, and his gangsters can only be described as a "Thugocracie". A Banana Republic like any other, or perhaps worse.

4. Omri Ceren said:

Tiburon and Tamar: I think that the points of our disagreement are two-fold. The first is precisely what Tiburon gets frustrated about - the idea that a smooth-functioning democracy really must bind itself to the _process_ of its electoral and parliamentary system (and to say that Israel's system is parliamentary one is not to say that the Knesset is Parliament - it merely differentiates Israel's form of government from one in which the President is elected directly, as was the case for Netanyahu, Barak, and the first Sharon government). As (Christopher Hitchens put in an article that came out within the last couple of weeks (I think it was Hitch - for some reason I can't find the cite right now), the time to make decisions is election time and when laws are passed. It's the process itself, as much as anything else, which protects democracies from becoming, in Tamar's words, thugocracies - Sharon won the election, perhaps under false pretenses, but he won it. Until the Knesset overturns his administration in a vote of no confidence, it's incumbent upon citizens never to cross a line into violent opposition to the civilian government (and it goes without saying that the army is bound to the decisions of that government).

I think Robert's point is a little more biting - that civilian laws can violate fundamental rights. That, of course, is the crux of the debate about disengagement. Two comments: (1) I appreciate the example of the Nuremberg Laws, but we must be careful never to make them into an analogy - Sharon is not Hitler; disengagement is extermination. Full stop. I'm not saying you turned it from an example to an analogy, but the slippage in rhetoric is so common nowadays that the warning bears repeating nonetheless (2) I don't think that the disengagement is a fundamental violation of the human rights of Israelis. It's wrenching and painful to everyone who cares about Jews and Israelis (not just "Israel's future," as Tiburon snarkily puts it). If Israel does not disengage from Gaza now, they will have to do so in the future - this is nothing more or less than cutting its losses, and hopefully gaining the diplomatic capital to annex some of the West Bank in the bargain. The suggestion that only post-Zionists can support disengagement, which Tiburon states explicitly and which underlies the other comments, neglects this fundamental point.